Flickering Firelight
by lilypottersghost
Summary: drabble for a prompt on tumblr: for head boy duties, James and Lily have to help prepare de decoration in Hogwarts. Trying to get to know the muggle world better, James decides to carve pumpkins manually, but loses track of time. Lily finds him late at night.


_prompt from legolembas on tumblr: For head boy duties, James and Lily have to help prepare de decoration in Hogwarts. Trying to get to know the muggle world better, James decides to carve pumpkins manually, but looses track of time. Lily finds him late at night. (or something along those lines)_

 _/_

The nightmare woke Lily with a start. It took her a few moments to realize that she was safe under the covers in her bed in the girls' dormitory and not where she had stood in her dream: against the wind on the edge of a cliff, her red hair blowing against her face. Below, where there should have been water, there had roamed the darkened souls of the dead. There had been all the faces from the DEAD OR MISSING section in the Daily Prophet, all the pairs of young eyes she'd seen in school that hadn't returned to school after the summer staring up at her. Their souls reached out for her.

Then, there had been a flash of green light and she had been falling through the air to join them. But before she could reach the bottom, she woke up gasping for air. She tried to slow her heartbeat and took in the room around her, the soft breaths of the girls sleeping around her, Marlene's faint snoring.

But the dormitory was too dark. The moonlight from out the window wasn't helping; it only increased her nerves.

 _The fire_ , she thought. She needed the brightness of the common room. That would ease her mind.

The stone floor was ice to her feet, and she shivered as she walked from the dormitory and down the steps to the room below.

There was flickering firelight, a lingering scent of melted chocolate, some abandoned games of Wizard's Chess on a few of the tables, open books sprawled over arms of chairs, and, to Lily's surprise, a James Potter sitting by a table by the window, hunched over a pumpkin with his arms crossed in front of him, tapping a pocket knife against his chin in thought. His glasses were askew across his nose and his hair was hopelessly messier than usual. Lily knew he hadn't slept at all since she'd left the common room to go to bed at midnight, which had been three hours ago.

"Potter," she said.

His eyes shot up to meet hers. "Lily!"

She couldn't quite see in the dim light, but she was pretty sure that he blushed.

Lily walked towards him. "What are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?" he countered.

"I asked you first," she said as she came to stand next to him. For the first time, she got a closer look at the pumpkins on the table. And promptly burst out laughing.

"What in God's name are those?"

"They, uh–they're supposed to be a Jack O' Lanterns."

"They're horrifying, that's what they are."

"Well, I think that might be part of the point."

Lily shook her head. "I don't know whether to laugh at you or feel sorry for you. Why didn't you just use your wand?"

"I used it to get rid of the smell of pumpkin seeds, but I wanted to carve them manually," said James, looking down at his feet, which were covered by knitted socks striped with Gryffindor's colors. "You know, like a muggle. Thought it would be more authentic, or whatever…"

"James," she said, bending down to meet his gaze. "I know I made fun of you earlier, but you did not have to stay up until three in the morning trying to prove me wrong."

He smirked at her. " _Did_ I prove you wrong?"

She giggled. "No. If anything, you proved me right. Now go to bed."

Sighing, he nodded and got up to leave. He was halfway to the staircase when he stopped and turned to face where she sat on the couch by the fire. "Evans?" he said.

"Yes?" Lily asked.

"You never told me why you're down here."

"Oh." Lily hesitated to tell him the truth. "I… I had a nightmare, that's all."

James's expression melted. "What was it about?" He took a step toward her.

"Nothing, nothing."

"It was obviously something if you woke up from it and had to come down here, Evans. But if you don't want to tell me, that's fine." He walked to the couch.

"What are you doing?" Lily asked as he sat beside her.

"I can't leave you alone down here."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I can take care of myself."

"I never said you couldn't."

Secretly, she was relieved to have someone with her. They sat in silence for a while, intermittently chatting about classes and head student duties.

Lily was staring at the fire when she thought aloud, "Do you ever feel like this is the end of something? Like this war… it's the end of the world?"

James's eyes widened enough to make Lily regret saying anything at all.

"Never mind," she said.

"No, no," James said, shifting to face her completely. "I feel like that too, sometimes."

Lily frowned. "I feel it every day. I don't know why, and I don't know how to make it stop. And there's something about this time of year, about Halloween. You know how Professor Trelawney said that time is circular? And how around October it becomes blurred, and the dead become uneasy? Maybe it's just me… but something feels different this year."

"I wouldn't trust everything Trelawney says, Lily. She's trying to scare us most of the time."

"I know, I know. I just can't help it."

She thought she saw pity in James's eyes, or perhaps it was understanding–the line between the two emotions were often unclear. "I think the war is getting to me," she said.

"Is this why you had a nightmare?"

Lily nodded. "I think so."

James leaned closer to her. "Would it be better for you to talk about it? You know, get it out? I won't tell anyone."

She stared into his eyes, trying to calm her nerves before nodding slowly. She glanced back to the fire. "I was by a cliff, and there were these dead people, and I don't know… I think I was falling. But the scary part was the end–-there… there was a flash of green light."

He visibly shuttered. "I know how that feels. I dreamt about it once too. The green light, not the dead people. The dead people part is fucking weird."

Lily laughed and nudged his arm. "You've probably had weirder dreams, Potter."

"I once had a dream you agreed to go to Hogsmeade with me."

She snorted. "That's the weirdest one of all."

They fell into a brief silence before James said, "I think all we can do is keep going. Even if times are tough, even if we're scared out of our minds, we just have to pretend like everything is fine and keep living our lives. That's the only way we'll be able to get through this. We can get through it together, Evans."

"Thanks," said Lily. "That actually wasn't terrible, Potter."

When James smiled at her, it was so bright and so real that she had to look away.

They sat there for the rest of the night, and she must have drifted off at some point because she woke up in the early morning, still on the couch.

Slowly, she came to her senses and drank in the fire dying down, the dim sunlight reaching through the window to touch her skin, and the arm around her shoulders. Wait–the arm around her shoulders? Her pillow, she realized, was a bony shoulder belonging to James Potter, who was fast asleep.

She lifted her head from his shoulder and snaked away from his touch, careful not to wake him. Then, she removed his crooked glasses from his face, placed them on the table, and slid across the couch, pretending not to notice the fluttering of her heart in her chest.

/


End file.
